Sacred Harp
This music was included in, and became profoundly associated with, books using the shape note style of notation popular in America in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
For example, the C major scale would be notated and sung as follows: The shape for fa is a triangle, sol an oval, la a rectangle, and mi a diamond.
[3][4] The singers arrange themselves in a hollow square, with rows of chairs or pews on each side assigned to each of the four parts: treble, alto, tenor, and bass.
Non-singers are always welcome to attend a singing, but typically they sit among the singers in the back rows of the tenor section, rather than in a designated separate audience location.
In contrast, Sacred Harp composers have aimed to make each musical part singable and interesting in its own right, thus giving every singer in the group an absorbing task.
Fuguing tunes, in which each section gets its moment to shine, also illustrate the importance in Sacred Harp of maintaining the independence of each vocal part.
Marini (2003) traces the earliest roots of Sacred Harp to the "country parish music" of early 18th century England.
[7] Around the mid-18th century, the forms and styles of English country parish music were introduced to America, notably in a new tunebook called Urania, published 1764 by the singing master James Lyon.
This pedagogical movement flourished, and led ultimately to the invention of shape notes, which originated as a way to make the teaching of singing easier.
Probably the most successful shape note book prior to The Sacred Harp was William Walker's Southern Harmony, published in 1835 and still in use today.
Shape notes and their music disappeared from the cities prior to the Civil War, and from the rural areas of the Northeast and Midwest in the following decades.
During his lifetime, the book became popular and would go through three revisions (1850, 1859, and 1869), all produced by committees consisting of White and several colleagues working under the auspices of the Southern Musical Convention.
[12] B. F. White had died in 1879 before completing a fourth revision of his book; thus the version that Sacred Harp participants were singing from was by the turn of the century over three decades old.
During this time, the musical tastes of Sacred Harp's traditional adherents, the inhabitants of the rural South, had changed in important ways.
Notably, gospel music – syncopated and chromatic, often with piano accompaniment – had become popular, along with a number of church hymns of the "mainstream" variety, such as "Rock of Ages".
The first move was made by W. M. Cooper, of Dothan, Alabama, a leading Sacred Harp teacher in his own region, but not part of the inner circle of B. F. White's old colleagues and descendants.
In 1902 Cooper prepared a revision of The Sacred Harp that, while retaining most of the old songs, also added new tunes that reflected more contemporary music styles.
[15] Ultimately, a committee headed by Joseph Stephen James produced an edition entitled Original Sacred Harp (1911) that largely satisfied the wishes of this community of singers.
[16] The James edition was further revised in 1936 by a committee under the leadership of the brothers Seaborn and Thomas Denson, both influential singing school teachers.
[18] Some people (see for instance the reference by Buell Cobb given below) believe that the new alto parts imposed an esthetic cost by filling in the former stark open harmonies of the three-part songs.
In recent years, Sacred Harp singing has experienced a resurgence in popularity, as it is discovered by new participants who did not grow up in the tradition.
[23] One of the first groups of singers formed outside the traditional Southern home region of Sacred Harp singing was in the Chicago area.
[25] In March 2008, the 2008 Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Convention attracted over 300 singers from 25 states and a number of foreign countries.
[29] There are regular singings in London,[30][31] the Home Counties, the Midlands, Yorkshire,[32] Lancashire, Manchester, Brighton,[33] Newcastle,[34] southwest England,[35] Bristol,[36] as well as in Scotland.
[43] In January 2009, Sacred Harp singing was introduced to Ireland, by Juniper Hill of University College Cork, spreading quickly from a class module into the wider community.
hosted the first annual Ireland Sacred Harp Convention, and the Cork community held their first All-Day Singing on 22 October 2011.
includes a sample of "The Last Words of Copernicus" by Sarah Lancaster, recorded at the 1959 United Sacred Harp Convention in Fyffe, Alabama, by Alan Lomax.
[60] The 2014 animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall features an original Sacred Harp composition in the second episode, "Hard Times at the Huskin' Bee".
There are also a handful of songs by European classical composers (Ignaz Pleyel, Thomas Arne, and Henry Rowley Bishop).
The book even includes five hymns by Lowell Mason, long ago the implacable enemy of the tradition that The Sacred Harp has preserved to this day.
